Google will have to cough up green after their Chrome browser was breached. A Russian student walked away with $60 000 after hacking Chrome from a fully-patched Windows 7 64-bit PC. This follows Google’s offer of prize money to anyone capable of exploiting any browser vulnerabilities.

Google's popular Chrome browser hacked. (image: livehacking.com)

Sergey Glazunov, a Russian university student, successfully hacked the browser at Google’s breakaway event Pwnium, claiming the prizemoney. According to ZDNet, he used an undiscovered Chrome-specific exploit to bypass its “sandbox” restriction preventing hackers from accessing the rest of a user’s computer once their browser is compromised.

Chrome previously featured in Pwn2Own, a security competition run by HP for the last four years, but this year Google launched their breakaway Pwnium event. Over the years, as the likes of Safari and Internet Explorer crumbled, Google’s browser has remained resolute.

While all of this was going on, at HP’s Pwn2Own event, Chrome was hacked in five minutes by a security firm. In the long haul, these security compromises improve users’ safety as Google uses these results to address security gaps.